Conservative Policies Don't Sell Themselves

People routinely say that they favor fewer government services in
the abstract, but they don’t want to eliminate anything that benefits
them. Paul Ryan has presented an impressive proposal to balance the
budget and essentially eliminate the government’s entitlement
liabilities over the long term, but everyone who has looked at it knows
immediately that it is a political non-starter. Obviously, one reason
why it is a non-starter is that there are simply too many
constituencies benefiting from the programs that would be changed by
Ryan’s proposal, but another reason is that for at least the last
thirty years political conservatives have become steadily worse and
worse at persuasion because they have allowed the “center-right nation”
myth to make them complacent.

The “center-right nation” story has been something of a curse for
conservatives, because it has convinced many of them that the public is
automatically and instinctively on their side, and they keep relying on
this to provide them with political success. If conservatives
recognized that they are not facing a “center-right nation,” they
wouldn’t necessarily be able to sell the public on proposals such as
Ryan’s, but they would at least understand that they have to persuade a
public that does not share their views. They might then realize that
the public is not going to reward them simply for showing up and
declaring their opposition to the other side.

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